Quotes About Language

Words, it seems, are like felt pens. If you don't use them for a while they dry up.

Researchers from Britain's Keele University have found that swearing after an injury may help alleviate pain. Evidently, the pain that you feel is inversely proportional to the number of middle names you give Jesus.

brb, ttyl ok? wow, i saved a 'ton' of time with those acronyms.

Any religion whose messiah's name isn't recognized by Microsoft Word can't be that much of a threat.

If women are breadwinners and men bring home the bacon, why do people complain about having no dough? I'm confused. Also hungry.

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights. You could no more call them back then ignore the mess they left when they fell.

There was a man with tongue of wood Who essayed to sing, And in truth it was lamentable. But there was one who heard The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood And knew what the man Wished to sing, And with that the singer was content.

This poor gambler isn't even a noun. He is kind of an adverb.

Each of them used the same words, like people who've been trained in sales, and as they moved to their Miatas and Audis I noted the bare shoulders of their women were the barest shoulders I'd ever seen, as if they needed only the night as a shawl.

Doesn't blood usually follow when language fails?

Finally, though, she had to admit a penis was silly, mostly hiding, like a diphthong in a sentence you had to work too hard to figure out.

Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable.

If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words—strike that, I love words—and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too.

A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

I'm not even tone deaf, that's the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.

Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don't like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven's sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame, and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter, and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing, and without enjoying swearing.

It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue

I'm not even tone deaf, that's the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing. I'M NOT EVEN TONE FUCKING DEAF. I'm tone DUMB.

The Hungarians have a wonderful word,' said Trefusis. 'It is puszipajtás and means roughly someone you know well enough to kiss in the street. They are a demonstrative and affectionate people, the Hungarians, and enthusiastic social kissers. Do you know young Adrian? you might ask and they might reply, I know him, but we're not exactly puszipajtás.

Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas... And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: I love you, Don't go in there, Get out, You have no right to say that, Stop it, Why should I, That hurt, Help, Marjorie is dead.